File Logging (Selenium IDE) Plug-in Roadmap

Currently, the roadmap is really simple and consists of the following three items:

Internationalisation

Usability improvements

Refactoring for reducing technical debt

There is also the following known issue:

An overwrite prompt is incorrectly shown when choosing an existing file as the log file. Log files are never overwritten and will always be appended to. So you can safely ignore the prompt and select yes.

I believe that file based logging should be an integral part of all test runners and hope that this plug-in is not required for too long.

20 Responses to File Logging (Selenium IDE) Plug-in Roadmap

This plugin work for me. Thanks a lot. Is there any way in Selenium IDE so that I can write the output of the echo command to a log file, instead of printing it in the console. Using the File Logging (Selenium IDE) Plug-in I am able to save the Selenium IDE logs
to a file, but it contains all the information which is not very easy to understand especially when I run multiple test cases. If such feature is not available could you please include it in your next version of the plugin.

I have a question about your File Logging and Stored Variables Viewer plugins for Selenium IDE. Is it possible for these to plugins to communicate with each other. I have a problem that i’m trying to work out. I’m using Selenium to run through a test suite. Each test in the suite submits a form on the website i am testing. (the point of this particular test suite is to test and make sure all the forms on the website are submitting correctly) I am storing a Confirmation ID on each confirmation page using the Stored Variables Viewer plugin. Before i got that plugin i was echoing out that Confirmation ID to the log pane and using the File Logging plugin to save the log. My problem is that the File Logging plugin saves everything in the log pane, which makes it a little difficult to find the echoed Confirmation IDs. The Stored Variables Viewer is a lot easier to read but then you can’t save that information automatically…you’d have to copy and paste it into notepad or word. Is there a way to get the best of both of these features to connect with each other? I would love an enhancement to the Stored Variables Viewer that would automatically save itself like the File Logging plugin. Is that possible? I really appreciate any advice or feedback you can provide on this. Thanks!

I moved your comment here, which is a more appropriate place for your comment. It would be possible in some future version of the stored variable viewer plugin to save the variables to a file. It is not high on the priority list though. In the meanwhile, you can use the power of the grep command to help you out. First echo the confirmation id with a prefix like conf id. and then use the grep command like (replace the logfile with the full path of your log file):

grep “^\[info\] echo conf id” logfile

I hope you get the general idea, see some of my earlier comments for more details about grep and get to know it. It is a powerful tool. Let me know if it helped.

Thanks for the quick reply! Yea, i saw your post earlier about grep. That had me researching it (i have never used grep before). I found a program for windows called Windows Grep. Works well enough to get the job done. I’ll be keeping up with the updates to the Stored Variable Viewer plugin as well just in case it happens to make it in there sometime. 😉

I’ve created a set of Selenium scripts to verify functionality against some of my company’s websites. The logging functionality is a great addition, however I have a request from our production support team which needs customization to be applied in another method. They would like to set up Selenium to run unsupervised and use one of our monitoring agents to send out an alert if a test fails. To do this the log needs to have a timestamp at the beginning of each line so that the monitoring agent knows where to start reading the log each night. Obviously this would be more customized than most people would need. I was wondering if it might be possible to get your help and take your source code for your plugin and make modifications to implement changes based on what they need. I’m working on RC scripts as well which I can customize the log file, however there are a lot of sites we would like to work with and only myself to create testing scripts so unfortunately some of this gets pushed back due to higher priority items. We only have a full set of tests currently in IDE, and some partial tests in RC. Thanks.

Running unsupervised tests using Selenium IDE is a recipe for disaster. Do you know that you can run your Selenese test suites without change using the Selenium RC -htmlsuite command line parameter? Take a look at my blog post Exploratory Maintenance and Debugging Selenium Tests
(http://blog.reallysimplethoughts.com/2010/09/15/exploratory-maintenance-and-debugging-selenium-tests/) for the exact command. Searching in Google should also provide more information. I would advise using a new log file for every run instead of a time stamp for every command. Though I would not recommend it, you can also wait for the new version of the File Logging Selenium IDE plugin. It already has ‘Log time stamp for each message’ option that you can turn on to get the time stamping.

Sorry if I’m ignorant, but why is running a simple Selenium sanity script such a recipe for disaster? The test verifies basic functionality of the site and checks that data is in fact loading from the database and is being displayed. Or is just using the Selenium IDE plugin to execute the tests that is a problem? As for using -htmlsuite so far I can’t get it to work. It fails on the first test, doesn’t run the remaining tests, doesn’t tell me where it failed, and the results file is completely blank… am I missing something?

Ok, an amendment to the above, I did figure out where it failed… for some reason the logging console was open but not open. It was stuck in minimized mode, I managed to get it open after noticing it. The test is failing on the custom js extension for comparing an assertion for assertEqual, which makes sense it would fail there since there’s no reference in the -htmlsuite to the extensions file to make use of extended functionality. That’s one of the reasons I’m converting the scripts over to RC, to replace the Selenium assertEqual with C# code, that and eventually we need to run scripts in all the browsers: IE (6, 7, 8 and 9), FF, Chrome, Safari and Opera.

The basic problem is that the Selenium IDE addon is meant for interactive use and is best not used for unattended test execution. But, if it works for you, go right ahead. To solve your problem with the Selenium RC way, you can also pass the user extension to Selenium RC using the -userExtensions parameter. Just remember to use it before the -htmlsuite parameter. Depending on how the extension was created it may work without changes or you may need to make changes/get the Selenium RC version of the extension. Hope this helped. The best option is of course to convert your tests to a programming language like C# but, until then, the htmlsuite option should serve you well.

Thanks. This is assuming the production support team can use the scripts as they currently are and get the monitoring software to read the log to send out alerts if it fails; right now it’s just an experiment. Odds are they will need to wait for me to convert scripts over to C#, that way I can make sure I write log files they can use. It might also be easier to execute the scripts once they are compiled.

Hey there,
thanks for your great add-ons. I am implementing Selenium IDE with TestRunner.html. My Selenium IDE has File Logging installed. I am finding that TestRunner has its own output process, sending me a message: “Firefox can’t find the file at chrome://selenium-ide/content/selenium-core/postResults”.

I was hoping to have TestRunner output the test results using the log file I specified in File Logging, but it doesn’t seem to be syncing up together. Do you know if File Logging works with TestRunner?

I believe that the TestRunner.html support was removed from Selenium IDE quite a while back. Due to the way the two work, it will not be easy to get the test results from there using the File Logging plugin.